HSU’s head is in the clouds

By on April 5, 2017

By Charlotte Rutigliano

HSU has been discussing making the switch to the cloud network over the last year, in hopes to improve file access for students and increase storage space.

Anna Kircher, who is the chief information officer for Information Technology Services, said currently students have 200 megabytes available on the user drives provided by the university, and about 15 gigabytes available through their school google account, though those 15 gigabytes include Gmail, Google drive and Google photos.

“The university is at the point to either move to the cloud or buy more servers,” Kircher said. “It’s cheaper and better to move to the cloud then to buy more hardware.”

Kircher said moving to a cloud network would allow for larger individual students files and office collection files.

Switching to a cloud network may sound like a good idea to some, but for students like junior marketing major Jessica Rocha, it raises concerns.

“I do have concerns about the safety and privacy of things stored in the cloud,” Rocha said.

Kircher said the university has been spending a lot of time talking about security.

“Two of the most important things to us are making sure that students only have access to their own files,” Kircher said. “And two, that this new system would not be hackable.”

Kircher said the university will most likely decide the vendor based off of the level of security they offer.

According to Kircher, who said the technology services budget is not going up, it would be less expensive to switch to the cloud network, though the end cost would depend on the vendor that the university chooses to go with.

According to Kircher there are four different vendors that the university is looking into for switching to their cloud network, Drobox, Box.net, Microsoft One Drive, or Google.

This switch would take place over the summer to be fully available in the fall of 2017.